Companies strive to halt Web surfing

When Procter & Gamble’s information-technology sleuths looked into why the company’s computers were running so slow, they found something surprising:

More than 50,000 YouTube videos were being downloaded from company computers every day. Along with watching videos, P&Gers were listening to 4,000 hours of music a day on Pandora, the personal playlist Web site.

The digital emergency led P&G to block Pandora and the movie and video site Netflix “as a first step,” and to warn workers about using the company’s Internet network for personal reasons.

In shutting down access to the two sites, P&G is joining other big employers that have blocked workers from getting on to some of the most popular social-media sites.